Which is Better to Design Websites - WYSIWYG or Hard Coding?

When designing a web page, many newcomers to website design use the
What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) or otherwise known as graphical
interfaces, to design their sites. Even some people who have been designing
for years still use the WYSIWYG programs.

While WYSIWYG is generally a quick way to get a web page designed, is it really the best option? Let’s take a look at both WYSIWYG and hard coding so you can decide for yourself which one will produce the results you want with the level of difficulty you are comfortable with.

There is a growing market for text editors and I have previewed many of them.
Some are written specifically for PHP development, usually on non-Windows systems like Linux. Others are used for generating HTML pages with embedded scripts to run on Windows servers in Active Server Pages (ASP) and/or Windows .NET environment. No matter what operating system you use, there are WYSIWYG programs to help you create web pages.

Hard coding the site involves using a text editor like NoteTab Pro. I refer to that editor as being like Windows Notepad on steroids. It comes with many pre-written clips to help you get through many often used procedures by clicking on them.

Each document is opened in its own tab for quick and easy switching between them. The replace function is extremely fast and supports regular expressions (REGEX) to make the searches more powerful.

The one thing NoteTab does not do is let you see what the page looks like
without previewing the document in your favorite browser. That’s not a problem though, since previewing your page in a browser is easily done with a single tap of a function key F8 to view in your primary browser such as Mozilla Firefox, or SHIFT+F8 to view in your secondary browser such as Internet Explorer.

If you open the included Clip Book (Tools/Clipbook/Open Clipbook or function key F4), it can replace color names with the hexidecimal equivalents, close links when you type the beginning of them, and even provide the closing styles tags when you begin to define them. To operate without the replacements when they work too well, right click on the clip book and choose Close Clipbook from the menu. To keep it active but out of the way, right click the clip book area and choose Hide Clipbook.

If you want support for NoteTab there are several lists on Yahoo Groups. Each list handles a specific area for NoteTab. I have been using NoteTab Pro since 1997 and wouldn’t design a site without it.

Visit http://notetab.com/ for complete info and download the free version. For more options and flexibility I highly recommend upgrading to Pro, currently at $29.95.

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